From the early days of the Internet,
“hackers” have creatively reconstructed the Internet and
Created programs and code that would
facilitate sharing of research material, communication, and construction of
communities. The term "hacker" initially meant someone who made
creative innovations in computer systems to facilitate the exchange of
information and construction of new communities.
However, largely through corporate, state,
and media cooperation of the term, “hacking” eventually came to suggest a mode
of "terrorism" whereby malicious computer nerds either illegally
invade and disrupt closed computer systems or proliferate computer codes known
as viruses and worms that attempt to disable computers and networks. While
hackers certainly are engaged in such activities, often with no clear social
good in mind, we argue below that a relatively unknown “hactivist” movement has
also continued to develop which uses ICTs for progressive political ends.
In terms of the prehistory of Internet
activism, we should also mention the community media movement that from the
1960s through the present has promoted alternative media such as
public access television, community and low
power radio, and public use of new information and communication technologies.
As
early as 1986, when French students coordinated a national strike over the
Internet-like Minutely system, there have been numerous examples of people
redeploying information technology for
their own political ends, thereby actualizing a more participatory society and
alternative forms of social organization.
. Since the mid-1990s, there have been
growing discussions of Internet activism and how new media have been used
effectively by a variety of political movements, especially to further
participatory democracy and social justice.
On the one hand, much of the initial
discussion of Internet politics centered on issues internal to the techies and
groups that constructed the code, architecture, and social relations of the
techno culture.
Thus, Internet sites like Wired and Slashdot
have provided multi-user locations for posts and discussion mixing tech,
politics and culture, as well as places for promoting and circulating open source
software, while criticizing corporate forces like Microsoft. Yet, on the other
hand, politicized techno subcultures, such as the anarchist community which
frequents Info shop, have increasingly used the Internet to inform, generate
solidarity, propagandize, and contest hegemonic forces and power.
In this respect, while mainstream media in
the United States have tended to promote Bush’s
Militarism, economic and political agenda,
and “war on terrorism,” a wide array of citizens, activists and oppositional
political groups has attempted to develop alternative organs of information and
communication.
In so
doing, we believe that there has now been a new cycle of Internet politics,
which has consisted of the implosion of media and politics into popular culture,
with the result being unprecedented numbers of people using the Internet and
other technologies to produce original instruments and modes of democracy.
Further, it is our contention here that in the wake of the September 11 terror
attacks and US military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, a tide of
political activism has risen with the Internet playing an important and
increasingly central role.
BY
KIMATI ELITRUDAH,
BAPRM 42582
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